Sonnets
and plays were the source of inspiration for readers at this 2016
event to commemorate the 400th death anniversary of William
Shakespeare. The Bard is better known in India than in Britain
according to a recent survey:

From
polyamory and anti-Semitism to the madrigal poetic-musical form and
Original Pronunciation, the discussions were open-ended and
contemporary. Which demonstrates how relevant Shakespeare continues
to be 400 years after his death.

Thommo, Ammu, Shoba

For a
tour of Shakespeare's 400th anniversary being celebrated in
Stratford-upon-Avon, consult BBC at

Reuben has provided a video on youtube that records the session for 25 minutes:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcOPHkkqQPwWe missed Talitha, and five other readers who were absent for
unavoidable reasons. But here we are at the end, smiling with our
guest, Reuben, who took many of the pictures at this session.

Antony
prophesies woe to the 'hand that shed this costly blood.' He says
Caesar's spirit will cry out in revenge and engulf Roman society in
the 'dogs of war.' To read Shakespeare is to recall quotations from
his work on every page.

It
is in the next scene that Mark Antony goes before the Roman citizens
to make his famous plea:

This
sonnet like many others contemplates the never-ceasing furrows that
hasting Time ploughs in a person's life, advancing to maturity and
then decay. It is placed aptly at number 60 to signify the minutes in
an hour,

Like
as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So
do our minutes hasten to their end

just
as sonnet 12 carries the significance of hours:

When I do count the
clock that tells the time

The
concluding couplet reinforces the message of several other sonnets,
including the famous sonnet 18, that the author of these sonnets can
rescue the object of his verse from the mortality of Time, because

… my verse shall stand

… despite his cruel
hand.

And
how true! For here we are, a group of readers 10,000 km away from
Stratford-upon-Avon, celebrating Shakespeare's 400th death
anniversary by reading his plays and poems, and rendering that
immortality he promised the subjects of his sonnets.

A
Midsummer Night's Dream Act 2, Scene 1

The
second selection of Shoba was the luscious description by Oberon.

I
know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where
oxlips and the nodding violet grows,

The
opening lines are ravishing in their beauty. They are sheer poetry
and the audience is taken as much by the poetry as the meaning, and
the wonderful rhyming of 'eglantine' with 'woodbine'. Shakespeare
never seems to need a Muse, so effortlessly can he conjure up visions
of a dreamy forest where the fairies sleep.

Eglantine

Woodbine - same as honeysuckle

Readers
inquired if this verse could not be sung. Benjamin Britten, the
British composer has set it to a melody which you can hear on
Youtube:

One
of the issues faced by modern readers of the sonnets is the seeming
defect of rhyme in several of them. For instance, in sonnet 60 what
are we to make of brow-mow? And in Oberon's speech of
prove-love? Prof David Crystal resolves the matter in a paper
he wrote (he has written much on the subject of pronunciation in
Shakespeare's time) where he asserts that in 96 sonnets there are 142
rhyme pairs that clash, so that only about one-third of the sonnets
rhyme to the modern ear. His researches make him conclude that that
the pronunciation has changed between the Early Modern English of
Renaissance times, and Modern English. You may read his paper in pdf
format on Sounding Out Shakespeare at

Thommo
raised the question of the plays being translated into Malayalam. Joe
affirmed that not only had many plays been translated but they had
also been performed abroad. In his lecture on the 450th birth
anniversary of Shakespeare

Shakespeare translations
exist in all the major Indian languages. In Kerala not only have many
plays been translated decades back into Malayalam, but there have
been Kathakali dramatisations of King Lear, and of several
other plays, by Kalamandalam, some of which have won acclaim abroad,
for instance at the Edinburgh Festival.

The
theme as before is the decay that Time accelerates in humans,
specifically in the young man who is the object of the early sonnets.
Perfection is only held in a moment, and before long decay sets in.
The last line bespeaks what love the poet had for the youth:

As he takes from you, I
engraft you new.

I engraft you new

The
poet infuses new life into the youth even as Time is at war to sully
his young friend. I engraft you new is the sprightly use of an
agricultural metaphor.

Sonnet
16

This
sonnet is a follow-on to the previous one and suggests the youth
could take more effective action to make war on tyrant Time.
Resorting to sexual imagery the poet urges

And many maiden gardens
yet unset

With virtuous wish would
bear your living flowers,

Plant early and often

Explicit
horticultural imagery is used as a metaphor for the youth planting
his seed in maidens (i.e., gardens yet unset) ready to bear
his children. And the poet confesses his poor pen cannot bring the
youth a second life as beauteous as an heir would bear. And in a
paradox he urges

To give away yourself
keeps yourself still,

Still,
meaning 'always' as usual in Shakespeare. Transfer yourself into your
children to have a sure future. Many of the initial sonnets are a
plea supposedly advanced by the mother of the youth, who enjoined the poet to
urge her son to marry and beget children. One theory is that the first seventeen sonnets were written at the request
of William Herbert's mother, the Countess of Pembroke, to speed the
marriage of her son. For clarity on the dramatis personae of
the sonnets, see

Thommo
read the entire scene where the loan of three thousand ducats (about
$300K in today's terms) is negotiated between Bassanio and Shylock
with Antonio as the guarantor, for a pound of his flesh. This leads
to the fine satirical speech by Shylock,

Signior Antonio, many a
time and oft

In the Rialto you have
rated me

About my moneys and my
usances:

Shylock played by Al Pacino in the 20004 film

Joe
remarked that this play has sometimes been cited as anti-Semitic for
its portrayal of Shylock as an avaricious Jew. Yet it is not so, for
Shakespeare gives him fine lines with which to expose the hypocrisy
of Christians. And Al Pacino acted the part with great passion in the
2004 film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379889/
) to bring out the central lesson: be one Jew or Christian, at bottom
we are all human and have the same flaws and live by the same laws:

As
Thommo pointed out most of the professions were denied to the Jews in
the Middle Ages and they had to live in ghettos; they were not
allowed to own property; so they turned to money-lending to earn a
living.

5.
Gopa

As
You Like It Act 5, Scene 3 The Forest

Touchstone
hopes to marry Audrey next day, and meeting two pages of the Duke he
asks for a song. The result is this delightful ditty which would
have been sung on stage in Shakespeare's time. You can hear the song
in a tune from those times:

A
soprano sings It was a lover and his lass, With a hey and a ho and
a hey nonino, to lute accompaniment, with music composed by
Thomas Morley, a prominent English composer, around 1600.

It was a lover and his lass, With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino

Touchstone
claims the song made no sense, but what a lovely scene it evokes of
the springtime! Gopa mentioned the poetic form of the verse may be
classed as a madrigal, popular at the time in England,
imported from Italy. There is a long history of the madrigal in music
which may be consulted online

In
spite of the difficulty of attributing to any sonnet the notion that
it is the personal statement of Shakespeare, there is one that people
point to as his testament, the “grave 146th sonnet addressed to the
soul of man.” (Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery,
Cambridge
University Press, 1935)

It
is a profoundly meditative sonnet, not religious, for it nowhere
mentions God or the after-life. But it does reflect on the
relationship of body and soul. It’s a sonnet of renunciation,
perhaps a reminder about death addressed to his mistress, but for
this you have to read ‘poor soul’ in the first line as her,
rather than himself. Others regard the sonnet as a contemplation on
the futility of our lives in the face of ever-present mortality.

Dying for love

The
last three lines convey the message that it is the soul within the
human that is to be nourished, and that is the path to overcoming
death. The cry there's no more dying then is the note of hope
on which this sonnet ends: death as a total fulfilment that forbids
further recurrence of the joys and travails of life.

Within be fed, without
be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on
Death, that feeds on men,

And Death once dead,
there's no more dying then.

The
last line has the kind of finality that sonneteers wish for their
sonnets, a closing that wraps a lid with a definitive thought, after
the back and forth of the line preceding it:

And Death once dead,
there's no more dying then.

In
the second line Fooled by is a conjecture by a scholar,
Malone; in the quarto there is a corruption and the words My
sinful earth are repeated. About quartos and folios the
information provided by the Folger Library (devoted to Shakespeare)
in Washington, D.C., is enlightening:

It
is arguably the most famous line in the entire Shakespearean canon
and has been performed by some of the finest actors to grace the
stage. In performance, the power of the speech in iambic pentameter
is even more potent, than the words alone. Most lines have 11
syllables with the last syllable unstressed (feminine ending).

Laurence Olivier in 'To be or not to be'

Hamlet
is depressed and thinking about killing himself as a means to end his
"sea of troubles." In previous scenes he has said (Act 1,
Sc 2):

O, that this too too
solid flesh would melt

Thaw and resolve itself
into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting
had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst
self-slaughter! O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat
and unprofitable,

Seem to me all the uses
of this world!

Is
death oblivion? Then there’s nothing to be frightened of. But what
if it’s not? The thought of after-life gives him pause.

Hamlet
is not really speaking of suicide or the choice between life
and death. Instead, he is addressing the very issue of existence.
Shakespeare has enlarged the question into a metaphysical debate.

Lastly,
Joe recited a sonnet he wrote, a death sonnet, in honour of
Shakespeare whose 400th death anniversary we were gathered to
celebrate. It begins

When death shall beckon
me from day to night

Earth-wandering I will
crumble into dust,

and
ends

I shall encounter
darkness as a bride,

Embrace it in my arms
while I abide.

There
are several nods to Master William Shakespeare in the sonnet's lines. KumKum
heard Joe recite it once before and she liked it; she called it Christian
in thought which surprised Joe. Gopa said something about 'FB.'

7.
Priya

Sonnet
18

Priya
read the lovely sonnet 18 which all young men should read to their
special person; possibly all women deserve to have this sonnet read
to them by people who love them. Here is Tom Duddy's exegesis of the
piece from his reading at the Shakespeare 450th Birth Anniversary
Festival Symposium on Apr 27, 2014:

The
structure of this sonnet is 8/6, more common with Shakespeare. No. 18
is the most famous of his sonnets, because it is a sunny piece,
metaphorically and literally. The bravura of its opening line

SHALL I compare thee to
a summer's day?

takes
your breath away. From there the limitations of the summer’s day
comparison to the beloved is elaborated line by line for the next
seven lines! And then again an ecstatic declamation:

But thy eternal summer
shall not fade

The
reasons it will not fade are somewhat tendentious but stated grandly,
ending with the idea that death won’t come to her. The couplet
tells why:

So long as men can
breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and
this gives life to thee.

The
poet is boasting that what gives immortality is hiser being embedded
in the sonnet as the subject, for the poet's verse will endure beyond
his death and her death.

Indeed,
he was justified in that supreme confidence, for here we are reciting
it some 400 years later, and you can bet it will be recited 1,000
years later too – if humans are still around.

Prof
Duddy says the repetition of the word ‘this’ is extraordinary in
the last line. It is very telling. Is this a love poem? Sure it is.
Prof Duddy quoted the opening of John’s gospel, In the beginning
was the Word and the Word was with God … and the Word was made
flesh. It’s the poet’s words that will last.

Sonnet
116

This
sonnet is a paean to immortal, never-changing love:

Let me not to the
marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love
is not love

Which alters when it
alteration finds,

The poet exclaims it is
an ever-fixèd
mark. Priya advanced the opinion that love will not change, but
the person loved may change. That would imply there is an innate
force called love in a person that can latch on to different persons,
perhaps even at the same time. Then it would be called polyamory,
a word that came to be used in the US ca. 1992 and means 'having
simultaneous close emotional relationships with two or more other
individuals, viewed as an alternative to monogamy, esp. in regard to
matters of sexual fidelity.' Regardless, the practice has existed
since ancient times, at least among males.

That is permissiveness,
said Gopa. Joe added as a counterpoint to Sonnet 116, that in modern
management jargon there is a paradoxical statement characterising the
life of corporations: change is the only constant.

Priya referred to Count
Orsino in the Twelfth Night, who is in love with the idea of love,
rather than a particular person, and so finds it easy to switch his
love from Olivia to the pageboy, Cesario, who is really Viola. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orsino_(Twelfth_Night)

8.
KumKum

Sonnet
97

KumKum
chose 97, and I repeat here Tom Duddy's commentary from his lecture,
referenced above. It is the first Absence Sonnet among the 154
telling how the poet feels when the beloved is not there.

HOW
like a winter hath my absence been

…

And
yet this time removed was summer's time,

Pause
a moment – the poet is not remarking on her absence,
but his. That inversion is striking, is it not? He implies thereby
that mentally she was always in his mind, with him, but it was he who
was absent from hers. And though it was in sunny summer, the
separation made it seem like dreary winter. The summer-winter
contrast has to be imagined in the context of English weather.Then next sonnet in the sequence, No. 98, is also an Absence sonnet, which beginsFrom you have I been absent in the spring,and as in No. 97 the poet compares the absence to winter in the penultimate line:Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,

Helen
Vendler in her book, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, notes
that Keats remembered No. 97 so well that he transmuted it into the
ode To Autumn. She cites the contrasting phrases in the
sonnet: “The repeated subversion of any pleasure – as teeming
and rich yield to widowed wombs and decease, as
abundant issue becomes orphans and unfathered fruit,
as singing turns to dull cheer – suggests the final
power of the imagination over what might be called objective
reality.”

Prof
Duddy asked why there is a redundancy between widowed wombs
and lords’ decease, since the decease of the lord implies a
surviving widow. I think this is the emphasis that Shakespeare lays
on often, when he restates, or explicates one line or word with
another line or word. Take Hamlet's lines quoted above,

O,
that this too too solid flesh would melt

Thaw
and resolve itself into a dew!

The
three words 'melt', thaw', and 'resolve' indicate the same physical
action.

The
imaginative complexity in this sonnet comes from the poet living
through actual summer, yet it appearing to him as winter; and the
wanton burden of the prime (=spring, the season that just went
by) soon yielding abundant issue in teeming autumn (the
season to come). But that imagined fruitfulness of autumn gives him
no hope (hope of orphans). After this rigmarole the poet
returns to actual time, the summer, but sees the beloved enjoying
this pleasant season, but not he. Why? Because,

… thou
away, the very birds are mute;

Or,
if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer

That
leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

For
Joe lines 12 & 13 carry the pathos of the poem, especially line
12:

And,
thou away, the very birds are mute;

And, thou away, the very birds are mute; – the Mute Swan

Prof
Duddy characterised this as the art that conceals art (ars est
celare artem, in Latin, i.e., True art is to conceal art), how
effortlessly it seems the poet has conceived the poem so that he
gives no evidence of any artifice, although a sonnet by design is a
crafted work that must adhere to several rules. “We are not in the
presence of poetry but of texture, for the poet has simplified things
to the bone,” said Prof Duddy.

As
for the birds being mute, he found the opposite is the case in Fort
Kochi with koels, that start off the day with their insistent
whistling cry, repeated at intervals. Yet you can never spot them, so
secretive are they , emblematic of art concealing art. Of course, now
his vision is so bad, Prof Duddy would not be able to discern the
tree in which the koel sat, forget the koel.

This
speech of Prospero from one of Shakespeare's final plays is often
considered a farewell by the dramatist to the stage in London. He
retired soon after to Stratford-upon-Avon. You can watch Helen
Mirren, the actor, recite this speech at the BAFTA awards in 2014 in
a Youtube video (it begins at minute 3.00) :

Prospero
is banishing all the magical spirits that he had conjured to serve
him during their exile on the island, and he is giving up his powers.
There are tremendous evocative images in this short speech, all
clothed in matchless language. What impresses the hearer is total
absence of a single hackneyed expression; when Shakespeare elevates
he can raise you to the very stratosphere without your being aware.